Fortune Brands, Inc. - Delaware 1997

Beautiful engraved specimen certificate from the Fortune Brands, Inc dated in 1997. This historic document was printed by American Bank Note Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of an allegorical woman holding a globe next to the company logo. This item has the printed signatures of the Company's President and Secretary and is over 10 years old.




Certificate Vignette

Fortune Brands

Type Public (NYSE: FO)

Founded 1969

Headquarters Deerfield, Illinois, USA

Key people Norm Wesley, Chairman & CEO

Industry Green Inc.

Products

Moen

Master Lock

Jim Beam

DeKuyper

Knob Creek

Vox Vodka

El Tesoro

Titleist

FootJoy

Revenue $7.32 billion USD (2004)

Employees 34,000

Slogan Leading consumer brands. Consistently strong results.

Website www.fortunebrands.com

Fortune Brands, NYSE: FO is a holding company founded in 1969 as American Brands and later re-named in 1997. The corporate headquarters are in Deerfield, Illinois in the United States.

The American Tobacco Company was founded in 1890, and in 1969 American Brands became its parent company.

ACCO

In 1987 American Brands acquired ACCO, a holding company which owned several office supply subsidiaries, which included the Swingline brand. In 2005, the company spun-off ACCO to shareholders, and immediately thereafter ACCO merged with General Binding Corporation. This merged company is now known as ACCO Brands.

Acushnet

The Acushnet Company (purchased in 1976) is Fortune Brands' golf division, producing the Titleist brands of golf balls, FootJoy sports-related clothing such as shoes and gloves, and Cobra golf clubs.

Fortune sold off the Acushnet Company's Acushnet Rubber division in 1985, which was Acushnet's original business (circa early 1900s).

Home and hardware

Included in this division are Masterbrand Cabinets, Moen, Therma-Tru and Master Lock, among other well known brands.

Wine and spirits

Fortune Brands has been building a stable of well known wine and spirits brands including Jim Beam, Knob Creek and El Tesoro.

In July 2005, Fortune Brands acquired a number of additional brands from Pernod Ricard following Pernod Ricard’s acquisition of Allied Domecq. These brands include Canadian Club, Clos du Bois, Courvoisier, Harvey's Bristol Cream, Laphroaig, Maker's Mark, and Sauza.

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About Specimens

Specimen Certificates are actual certificates that have never been issued. They were usually kept by the printers in their permanent archives as their only example of a particular certificate. Sometimes you will see a hand stamp on the certificate that says "Do not remove from file".

Specimens were also used to show prospective clients different types of certificate designs that were available. Specimen certificates are usually much scarcer than issued certificates. In fact, many times they are the only way to get a certificate for a particular company because the issued certificates were redeemed and destroyed. In a few instances, Specimen certificates we made for a company but were never used because a different design was chosen by the company.

These certificates are normally stamped "Specimen" or they have small holes spelling the word specimen. Most of the time they don't have a serial number, or they have a serial number of 00000. This is an exciting sector of the hobby that grown in popularity over the past several years.